Comrades, it is natural that in a report which has to be made at such a moment the center of gravity should be the war with Poland and all those peripetias which we have experienced during this time. Let me begin a little farther back: from the period when the Polish war had not yet become a fact.

T h e y know that before the P o l i s h war we w e r e extremely cautious and offered the Poles, the P o l i s h bourgeoisie, in the most solemn manner, specially even in a manifesto in the name of the Central I n f o r m e n t Committee, peace2 on terms w h i c h w o u l d be extremely favorable to them, the Poles, a peace w h i c h w o u l d be disadvantageous to a w h o l e number of workers and peasants, the nationalities w h o were under the yoke of the P o l i s h landlords and the bourgeoisie. We proposed peace on the basis of the P o l i s h line, i.e., the line on which the Poles stood before the offensive began on April 26 of the current year, i.e., the line on which they received the whole of Byelorussia and a decent piece of the Ukraine, because they then had Volyn province, much to the east3* of Rovno, which they have wrested from us now. On this line we agreed to make peace, considering peaceful economic work, to which we had transferred the life of the army and the lives of tens of thousands of workers and peasants, to be much higher than the possibility of liberating Byelorussia and part of the Ukraine or eastern Galicia by military successes. Here, in international political and economic relations, it has been repeatedly confirmed and will be confirmed precisely that our new diplomacy, which is absolutely unusual, unforeseen in the history of monarchical and bourgeois states, can in no way yet be accepted in other countries, that when the Bolsheviks make a direct statement, no one in any state is able to understand that we are really conducting diplomacy on the basis of open statements and methods of special diplomacy, i.e., the Bolsheviks say: "We are ready to recognize that the Bolsheviks are not ready to accept the Soviet Union as a state of war". We supported the most frenzied chauvinism of the Polish bourgeoisie and landlords, the most frenzied chauvinism in France and other imperialist countries, who all reasoned that in ordinary diplomacy such a thing could not happen. Is it done in this way? It is there is weakness. Thus the offensive was decided not only by the Poles, but also by France, by virtue of the fact that we quite unusually said bluntly: for the sake of avoiding war, we are prepared to retreat, and in the negotiations which Marchlewski had conducted earlier, being the formal representative of the Polish Red Cross, in these negotiations such a line as a precondition for peace - huge concessions3. This concession was accepted as our weakness and led to war. You remember the beginning of the war, which gave the Poles success, before the conquest of Kiev, they possessed, according to preliminary calculations, a territory with a population of up to 4 million. You remember, after this success, the grouping of troops gave success and our troops, going on the offensive, quickly reached the main line of Poland.

Here begins a major reversal in the history of the Polish war, which in fact turned out to be the turning of the world. With this we must begin, in order to clarify the further history, and proceed to the most important thing which attracts every party man now, the most burning question, it is precisely that deep defeat, the catastrophic defeat which we suffered as a result of the whole development of the operation.

On July 12, when our troops in a continuous offensive, having already traversed a huge space, were approaching the ethnographic border of Poland, the English government [in the person of] Curzon addressed us with a note demanding that we stop our troops on a line of 50 versts from the ethnographic border of Poland on the conditions of concluding peace along this line4. This line ran along the line Bialystok - Brest-Litovsk and gave us Eastern Galicia. So this line was very favorable to us. This line was called the Curzon line. And that's when we faced the main question. Ceca had to make the most important decision. And this is the starting point to which my report will have to return in order to assess the crucial and basic question. The question before us was whether to accept this proposal, which gave us an advantageous frontier and thus stand on a position, generally speaking, purely defensive, or whether to use the rise in our army and the preponderance which we had in order to help the Sovietization of Poland. Here stood the fundamental question of defensive and offensive warfare and we knew in Tseka that this was a new question of principle, that we were standing at a turning point in the whole policy of the Soviet power.

Up to now, waging war with the Entente, because we knew perfectly well that behind every partial offensive of Kolchak, Yudenich was the Entente, we realized that we were waging a defensive war and defeating the Entente, that we could not finally defeat the Entente, that it was many times stronger than us. And we only tried to use as wide as possible formed gaps between the different Entente states in order to defend ourselves in time. The history with Yudenich and Denikin showed something unprecedented, unbelievable, from the point of view of calculation of forces, we broke them in pieces, and the smartest world politicians are not only the lusty from the colonial point of view, like England, lusty France, taking care of its billions of the former Tsar's house (and there are still such strange people who hope for their return); not only such arrogant politicians who think to seize something from Russia, not only big politicians interested in Russia, but also not interested directly, they found themselves in a state of disintegration, they, being a hundred times stronger than us, did not realize this possibility, because they disintegrated within themselves, because they could not take a single step, could not solve the simple problem of connecting three or four elements, connecting, harmonizing three or four mighty powers, having an infinite advantage in comparison with us, not only in the sense of finances, but also in the sense of power. We had nothing, and they could not connect themselves even in the financial sense, which gave us a gain. And this was at a time when the whole bourgeoisie was seething with rage and hatred against Bolshevism, and it turned out that we were stronger than they were. They let the enemy go piecemeal, shouting that they did not wish to bring back the Tsar, they could not prevent the purely monarchist policy of Yudenich and Denikin, and thus repelled the element which should have been behind them (the muzhik, kulak elements).

And so, in sum, it turned out that we were convinced that the military offensive of the Entente against us was over, that the defensive war with imperialism was over, that we had won it. Poland was the bet. And Poland thought that she, as a power with imperialist traditions, was in a position to change the character of the war. So the assessment was that the period of defensive warfare was over. (I ask you to write down less. It must not get into print.) On the other hand, the offensive showed us that with the powerlessness of the Entente to crush us militarily, with its powerlessness to act with its own soldiers, it can only push against us individual small states, which are of no military value and which hold the landlord-bourgeois order, only at the cost of the measures of violence and terror which the Entente gives them. There is no doubt that the Menshevik democratic capitalism which still holds on in all the states bordering Russia, formed from the former composition of the former Russian Empire, beginning with Estonia, Georgia, etc., it holds on with the help of what England supplies. She gives guns, soldiers, uniforms, money to keep the workers in subjection. A new task is before us. The defensive period of the war with world imperialism is over, and we can and must use martial law to launch an offensive war5. We have beaten them when they were advancing on us, we shall now try to advance on them in order to help the Sovietization of Poland. We shall help the Sovietization of Lithuania and Poland, so said our resolution, when this resolution was put forward in the Central Committee, we had no lack of understanding of the somewhat clumsy character of this resolution in the sense that it was as if one could not vote against it. How can one vote against the aid to Sovietization? If we compare our attitude towards Poland with our attitude towards Georgia and Latvia, the difference becomes quite clear. We did not pass a resolution that we would militarily help the Sovietization of Georgia or Estonia. We passed a resolution to the contrary, that we would not help. On this ground there were glad conflicts with the revolutionaries and communists of these countries. They made bitter speeches against us, saying, how can you make peace with the White Guard Latvian executioners, who subjected to gallows and torture the best Latvian comrades who shed blood for Soviet Russia. We heard these speeches from Georgians as well, but we did not help Sovietization of Georgia and Latvia. And now we can't do it, we don't care about that. The salvation and strengthening of the Republic is the overwhelming task. In relation to Poland we have changed this policy. We decided to use our military forces to help the Sovietization of Poland. Hence the further general policy. We did not formulate this in an official resolution, written in the minutes of the Central Committee, which constitutes a law for the party and the new congress, but among ourselves we said that we must feel with our bayonets whether the social revolution of the proletariat in P o l a n d is not ripe? And here we were posing a practical question which, as it turned out, was not quite clear theoretically for the best communist elements of the international comradeship, that is, of the Communist International. When the Comintern Congress was in Moscow6 in July, it was at the time when we were deciding in the Central Committee this question. At the Comintern Congress we could not put this question, because this Congress had to take place openly, because of its enormous, revolutionary, general political world significance, which will have an impact many times greater than it has had so far.

At this congress there were elements, such as the German independents7 , who have now adopted the most disgusting policy against the Soviet power. It was impossible to throw them out at that time. It was necessary to show before the world Communist Party that we did not want to let them into our ranks. Thus, at the Congress of the Communist International we had to speak openly. Therefore, this question was deliberately not touched upon at the Congress.

The transition to an offensive against the Entente allies could not be raised there, because the stage of development necessary to discuss this question was not there. We had to tolerate the "Rote Fane "8 and many others cannot even think that we would help the Sovietization of Poland with our hand. These people consider themselves Communists, but some of them remain nationalists and pacifists9. Of course, the Communists who have lived through more, [such are] the Finnish com[arists], have left no shadow of those prejudices. I say they have not, because they have lived through a longer period of war. When I had an English labor delegation with me and I spoke to them that every decent English worker should wish for the defeat of the English Government, they did not understand me at all10. They made faces that I don't think even the best photograph could capture. Their heads were completely unable to grasp the truth that in the interests of international revolution the English workers should wish for the defeat of their government.

The facts that [in] Poland the proletarian population is well developed and the rural proletariat is better educated, these facts tell us: you must help them to sovietize.

And this is the stage at which events caught us and at which our party became. It was the most important turning point not only in the politics of Soviet Russia, but also in the politics of the world. Hitherto we had acted as a single force against the whole world, dreaming only of catching the gaps between them so that the enemy could not crush us, but now we said: we are now stronger and to each of your attempts at an offensive we shall respond with a counter-offensive, so that you may know that you risk not only that you will lose a few millions, as you lost to Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin, but that you risk that for each of your offensives the area of the Soviet Republic will expand. Russia has hitherto been only an object over which to wisecrack and judge how best to divide it between Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin. And now Russia said: and we shall see who is stronger in the war. That's how the question came up. This is a change in all politics, in world politics. Here the historian will have to note that this is the beginning of a new period.

What were the results of this policy? Of course, the main result was that we now found ourselves suffering a tremendous defeat. To get to that, I must describe what preceded it. To what extent did we succeed in probing with the bayonet the readiness of Poland for social revolution? We must say that this readiness is small. To probe with the bayonet meant that we had direct access to the P o l i s h sharecroppers and to the P o l i s h industrial proletariat, since they remained in P o l a n d . The industrial proletariat remained in Warsaw, in Lodz, in Dąbrowice, which are very far from the frontier. On the other hand, in order to really probe the degree of readiness of the proletariat of P o l a n d , first of all the industrial proletariat and, secondly, the w o r k i n g proletariat, w h i c h stood on the basis of the o u t r i n g, we had to clear out the P o l i s h bourgeois troops and occupy not only the districts of W a r s a w a r d , but also those districts w h i c h had the industrial proletariat. And these districts begin even earlier5* than Warsaw, which could not be occupied. Therefore it was possible to probe the readiness of Poland for the socialist revolution with extremely little success. We met a great national upsurge of the petty bourgeois elements, who, as we approached Warsaw, came to fear for their national existence. We did not succeed in gauging the real mood of the proletarian masses both in the sharecroppers and in the ranks of the industrial proletariat of P o l a n d .

T h e picture w h i c h w a s played out in international politics w a s something extremely instructive and w h i c h w a s the center of the event. T h i s side of the picture will be described in detail by Comrade Kamenev, who observed some of the peripetias in London11. We did not succeed in probing the development and preparation for the socialist revolution of the proletariat in Warsaw. Our approach proved that Poland could not defeat us, and we were very short of it. It turned out that all this changes international politics. We, approaching Warsaw, came so close to the center of world imperialist policy that we began to make it. It sounds incomprehensible, but the history of the "Action Committee "12 in England has proved, with absolute precision, that somewhere near Warsaw is not the center of the Polish bourgeois government and the republic of capital, but somewhere near Warsaw lies the center of the whole present system of international imperialism, and that we are standing in the conditions when we begin to shake this system and make policy not in Poland, but in Germany and England. Thus, in Germany and England we have created a completely new strip of proletarian revolution against world imperialism, because Poland as a buffer between Russia and Germany, Poland as the last state will remain entirely in the hands of international imperialism against Russia. It is the backbone of the whole Treaty of Versailles13. The modern imperialist world holds on to the Treaty of Versailles. Having defeated Germany, having settled the question - which of the two world powerful groups English or German will control the destinies of the world for the coming years, imperialism ended with the Treaty of Versailles. They have no other fixing of world relations, both political and economic, than the Peace of Versailles. Poland is such a powerful element in this Versailles world that by tearing out this element we break the whole Versailles world. We had set the task of occupying Warsaw; the task changed and it turned out that it was not the fate of Warsaw that was being decided, but the fate of the Versailles Treaty. This is how the question was put in the whole German bourgeois Black Hundred and French press. The approach of our troops to the borders of East Prussia, which is separated by the corridor of Poland, going further to Danzig, indicates that Germany is all boiled up. News began to come out that tens and hundreds of thousands of German Communists were crossing our borders, telegrams from German Communist regiments flew. Decisions had to be made to help not to publish and to continue to declare that we were at war. When now newspapers which do not share the views of the Bolsheviks come in and paint the situation of East Prussia, an extremely interesting picture emerges, which reminds me of certain periods of the Russian Revolution of 1905, when the average type of Black Hundred Revolutionary in Germany appeared.

Then the revolution of the 5th year in Russia was taking the first major steps to dig up, to raise the largest and at the same time the most backward elements of the peasantry, and this work was helped by the Black Hundred elements, who tried to raise the peasantry by their agitation against us, Then this agitation was carried out by the Black Hundred priests and officers, and it turned out that this newly emerging Black Hundred political organization for the first time united the peasants, attracted them to the organization, and these raised peasants today were making Black Hundred demands, and the next day they were demanding all the land from the landlords. And now the same thing has happened in Germany. I did not bring with me a correspondence from a German anti-Bolshevik press (which, of course, I could not publish for lack of time), in which it is said that the whole of East Germany is boiling, and all the Kappists14 (those who stood for Kapp - our Kornilov), all these Kappists are for the Bolsheviks, and it turns out that when you talk to an undeveloped German guy who doesn't understand anything about politics, he hesitates and says that you have to bring Wilhelm back because there is no order, and at the same time he says the opposite, that you have to go after the Bolsheviks. And we see that East Germany is boiling, some unnatural bloc is formed, headed by Kornilov's generals, who are like men of military reasoning and whose slogan is: only war with France at all costs, no matter with whom and no matter under what conditions; these German officers are politically illiterate people, they do not know that war has certain consequences (where they can understand it), such a German officer should study for 10 years in different revolutions to learn something. And so they have the idea of war with France by all means. And thus it turned out that we had a force and a significant force against the Entente.

And at that time we replied to Curzon - you are referring to the League of Nations15. But what is the League of Nations? It is not worth a spit. Another question is who will decide the fate of Poland. The question may be decided not by what the League of Nations says, but by what a Red Army soldier says. This is what we replied to Curzon, if we translate our note into plain language16. And then it was understood in Germany in this way, and an unnatural characteristic bloc was formed, a bloc which was not drawn up by treaty, was not written down anywhere, voted, but a bloc in which the Kappovites and the Kornilovites, the whole mass of the patriotic element was together with the Bolsheviks. This was the problem at that time, and this problem could not be solved by the German Communists at that time, they could not solve it because they were sitting here in Moscow at that time, sitting and solving the most primitive question of how to create elements of a real Communist] party in Germany, solving the basic question of how to treat the right-wing independents, whose leaders were like our Martov and whose workers were Bolshevik-minded. They were preoccupied with the solution of this world question which is arising in all countries. And at this time the events in Germany jumped over all solutions of these questions and a bloc of consistent and extreme patriots and communists emerged, recognizing consciously the bloc with Soviet Russia. The bloc was such that there are only two forces in world politics: one is the League of Nations, which gave the Treaty of Versailles, and the other is the Soviet Republic, which tore up this Versailles Treaty and the unnatural bloc of Germany was for us.

Here was a gigantic fact of international politics, which I have observed in parts more than once and on which I had to dwell when I summarized the campaigns of Yudenich, Kolchak, and Denikin and spoke of the conditions for concluding peace with Estonia, Georgia, and Latvia17. On an international scale it turned out not only that we beat Kolchak, Denikin and conquered the Russian affluent peasantry, the anti-communist peasantry, which, by the way, decided the fate of Kolchak and Denikin, but we conquered the petty bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie of small countries, formally independent but crushed by the Entente. This decided the conclusion of peace with us of Estonia18, the first country to conclude peace with us. It was entirely bourgeois, it was entirely in the pockets of English and American billionaires, it was entirely against peace with us, and it made peace with us, because international imperialism seemed so straw to it.

In Germany, the Communists stayed with their slogans. When the German Left agreed to the absurdity that there was no need for a civil war but, on the contrary, a national war against France, it was unheard-of stupidity. To put the question in this way bordered on treason. Without a civil war, you can't get Soviet power in Germany. If you make a bloc with the German Kornilovites, they'll cheat you. In Germany there is a weak little Communist Party19 and a strong party of Shey-Demans20, the right-wing Mensheviks. A huge proletarian party with our Martovs at its head. Politics between two chairs.

And the first result was that a number of small states, which all joined us, in spite of all their hatred of the Bolsheviks, next to the reprisals against their Bolsheviks - Estonian, Finnish, Latvian - they had to make peace with us and said that internationally we small countries were closer to Soviet Bolshevik Russia. We have proved in practice that for Germany, where the mood of the masses, the most undeveloped and Black Hundreds, who are able to say: better Wilhelm, that internationally there is no other power for Germany but Soviet Russia. The national wishes of Germany consist of two magnitudes, which not to distinguish politically is to make a tremendous mistake. One dimension is to throw off the Treaty of Versailles, which is strangling them. On the other hand, the German imperialists who joined in this said: we not only want to throw off the Treaty of Versailles, but in fact they wanted the restoration of an imperialist Germany. Not only towards the small countries, but also towards Germany, we probed the international situation.

In my opening speech at the Comintern Congress21 which I held in Petrograd, I had to speak about the international situation and I said that the population on earth is now up to one billion and three quarters22, of which 1/4 billion in the colonies and three quarters of a billion in those countries which are defeated, meaning 70% in the colonies. I said that even with this crude definition, if we take the politics of the world, 7/10 of the population would be that which, with the right politics, would stand for Soviet Russia. It may be asked, how can they stand for Soviet Russia when they are not communists? And how did Estonia and Georgia stand for one with us, even though they shoot communists there?

By our international policy we have now proved that we have an alliance of all the countries living under the Treaty of Versailles, which is 70% of the entire population of the earth.

Whereas in Germany they limited themselves to only trembling and expectation, in England the situation was different. In England Curzon gave us an ultimatum, either stand back or we fight. They were accustomed to think that they, who had signed the Peace of Versailles, could dispose of the whole world. When we replied that we did not recognize the League of Nations, the French newspapers wrote: "an impertinent answer "23. The expression is from the terminology of the schoolroom, where the teacher tells the children that you are being impertinent; in world politics such terms cannot be used. The fact is that the League of Nations as such did not prove itself. It turned out that in order to go to war with us, one must first ask the English laborer. As a result of our declaration, it turned out that the English proletariat had risen to an entirely new revolutionary stage. We, standing near Warsaw and not being able to take this Warsaw and probe what is the readiness of the Polish worker for rev[olutionary] action, we probed the English workers and raised them to a new stage of revolutionary action. When we were given an ultimatum, the English workers, 9/10 of whom are Mensheviks of the most virulent kind, responded by forming an Action Committee. The English press got worried, shouted that it was a dual power, and they were right. England was at the stage in political relations [in] which Russia found itself after February 1917: along with the government there were councils which had a conciliation committee and actually checked every step of the government, when the bourgeoisie of the whole world said that it was impossible to exist like this, and now in England there was a Council of Action, and this Council of Action prevented England's war against us. None of the threats that Lord Curzon had made against us could be carried out, and the labor movement in England rose to an unbelievable height.

The Action Committee has created an organ of the whole working mass, a political center which has become side by side with the bourgeois and which does not go in concert with it. At the head of this Action Committee are the bright Mensheviks and the bright right-wing e[c]ers, the people whom we once persecuted. They wanted the 2nd Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, where representatives of all countries came together. Only now has the full text of the resolutions been published, where this policy is adopted on an international scale24. And what was the resulting ratio? They say that we offered conditions unheard of. There is now a split there. In any case, a split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in all the countries of the world without exception.

At a time when we, with the help of the Comintern, did what we could not do for decades and in the conditions of a complete split with international imperialism, at a time when in England the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were united in a Committee of Action, we had to solve tasks of inordinate difficulty. The progress of the workers' movement is worth it [to] split ideologically with the Mensheviks and at the same [time] to act together with them in the Action Council.

At first glance this seems contradictory and opportunistic, but we say: you will have to carry on again the Russian revolution in its basic outlines. The Action Committee in England is quite similar to our V[russian] Central Committee of those times when Gots, Dan and others were deciding matters, it is an association of all workers without distinction between the Menshevik and Bolshevik parties. Such an association, which competes with the bourgeois government, in which the Mensheviks are forced to act as Bolsheviks. We realize that the manifesto of the 17th, which the Mensheviks and S[osialists]-R[evolutionaries] of the first convocation issued, said that the war was imperialist, let us defend the minority25. They were confused, and the masses were led to us, and thus Plekhanov was right.

They say: we are for constitutional democracy, and you are for partial democracy. There's also the Action Committee, but that's an extreme case. It's a thing we had to read because it's the attitude of the most imperialist country [with] an unusually strong tradition of Menshevism. If we have a history of Menshevism for 15-20 years, there all the pro-organizations there are all solidly with a democratic system with Mensheviks at the head. It was all destroyed by the English Mensheviks and they had to step on the method of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We had the opportunity to say to the English, French workers that you have to teach them to be communists. The Comintern taught this. English politics is beginning to teach French politics.

At the same time you must learn on the ground of mass organizations to block with the English Bolsheviks when they are forced to speak constitutionally, so that the English masses learn this in practice. It was difficult for us to decide and we in Russia ourselves agonized over how many times it would be necessary for the Mensheviks and S[osialist]-R[evolutionaries] to fool the Russian workers so that they would cease to believe them. They fooled the Russian workers before the February Revolution26 , fooled them from May to the July offensive27 , fooled them again, and finally, by October, the Russian worker had matured enough not to allow himself to be fooled any longer. How many times it will be necessary for the English Mensheviks to inflate the English workers, this is not written in any book and cannot be written. It will be seen, but the English Bolsheviks must be able all the time to stand together with the masses, to educate them, to show them, to tell them: here you are being fooled again, here you have been fooled once more. And in the course of the present events in England we see, and Comrade Kamenev summarizes his impressions28 , that the English Mensheviks already feel themselves as a government, they know that the bourgeois government in England will not sit still, that it will be overthrown. They see before them the government post. "You are welcome, but you will fall from this governmental post just as your bourgeois government has fallen, and you will fall so that you will never climb it again."

This is the result of our international policy and the emerging relations in Western Europe.

And now I must turn to the main and sad [conclusion], which now emerges from this outcome. We have been thrown back at the front to such an extent that the fighting is going on near Grodno, and the Poles are approaching the line under which Piłsudski used to boast that he would come to Moscow. And that remained only a boast. It must be said that although we were thrown back, our troops still did wonders, they were thrown back hundreds [of versts] to the east and to the west, but they were not thrown back to the place at which we offered earlier to make peace with Piłsudski. And now Pilsudski will go to peace in conditions worse for him and in conditions better for us than our first proposal. But still we have suffered a tremendous defeat, a colossal army of 100,000 either in captivity or in Germany. In a word, a gigantic, unheard-of defeat.

What does that mean? It means that undoubtedly a mistake was made, because we had a victory on our hands and we let it go. So there was a mistake. Everyone has faced this question, and we in Tseka found the answer: what is the mistake? Where is it and should it be found? The mistake, clearly, must be either in the policy or in the strategy of the war. But you know that strategy and politics are inseparably linked. During the Civil War, during the Politburo we had to solve purely strategic questions, so purely strategic questions that we looked at each other with a smile: how did we turn into strategists? There were even people among us who had never seen war from afar, but in spite of that we had to deal with strategy, because strategy is subordinate to politics and one is inseparably connected with the other. Now, as in the epoch of the Judenic, Denikin offensive, more than once we solved purely strategic questions, we were no longer surprised by it. But now we must remember that all strategy is nothing but politics.

Now where to look for a mistake? Perhaps the mistake is political, perhaps strategic. I do not pretend in the slightest way to know military science; I apologize in advance to comrades who know this science theoretically and practically, but I will deal with it from the point of view of where to look for a possible political or strategic mistake.

I will now say that Ceca examined this question and left it open. In order to put this question to research, in order to solve it properly, we have to give great strength for this, which we do not have, because the future takes us completely, and we decided - let the past be solved by historians, let them then deal with this question. This is what we have come to. The mistake is either in politics or strategy, or both. There may have been a mistake in the response to Curzon's note of 12/VI, when we said: simply, never mind the League of Nations, let's go forward.

Needless to say, we were defining under the wrong definition. A correct definition is required of revolutionaries under difficult politics, accustomed to resolving issues victoriously when there is unheard-of heroism and the rise of the masses. We, in deciding this question, predetermined a general offensive line. This line was fundamentally correct - we are convinced of this - fundamentally it was intact and indeed coincided with a new period of world history, when Russia, which had hitherto been the object of solving the problem - whether Yudenich or Kolchak would eat it up and what they would eat - it determined the internal policy of England. And here, perhaps, we should have answered differently. We said that we basically accepted Curzon's proposal, but we would bargain. And we bargained on the basis of our decision until Kamenev had to bargain, for circumstances beyond his control, in such a way that he was thrown out29. We got the help of the Action Committee, so in the end Kamenev won, not Lloyd George. Perhaps we should have answered in this way: we accept on the basis that we will stop at the 50th verst or at the boundary you give. This is determined by the conditions of the military fronts. By receiving Eastern Galicia, we had a base against all modern states. Under such conditions we were becoming in the neighborhood of Prikarpattya Rus', which boils more than Germany and is a direct corridor to Hungary, where a small push is enough for a revolution to break out. We have maintained internationally the halo of a country that is invincible and is a great power. This is a great praise.

But there was another policy looming. We would not then have got the boiling that we had; we probably would not have got the Committee of Action, we would not have got the transition of the whole of English politics, proletarian and bourgeois, to a new stage. But we would have won a solid, calm, firm base of operations against middle Europe across the intended frontiers. It is possible, I repeat, that there was a political mistake here, for which the Central [Central] Committee in general is responsible, and for which each of us takes responsibility. This is the basic mistake. Strategy is subordinate to politics.

Another explanation is possible, which is that since the Central Committee determined the line of policy, since it determined the position of all Soviet organs, since it determined the limits beyond which our command could not go. You gave the task to help Sovietization, to cross the ethnographic border and to keep the border with Germany from where we stood, from Bialystok. A strategy could unfold, modifying its strategic conditions and tasks. It is possible to argue that strategists should precisely implement the solution of the task. But one thing is talk, motives, moods, and another thing is decisions. You can talk, but if you do not carry out decisions, you will be kicked out or put in jail. Without this consciousness, we would have fallen apart long ago. Here the strategy may make us realize and say: we do not have enough strength to attack, and having marched 50 or 100 versts, having stopped here, we would have stood in ethnographic Poland, we would have had a sure secured victory. We would now for sure, if we had stopped then, we would now have a peace, absolutely victorious, having kept all that halo and all that influence on international politics. It is possible that there was a strategic mistake.

These are the limits within which go in the main lines of all sorts of errors in which thought naturally revolved in the Central Committee. You will see why the prevailing opinion in the Central Committee was that no, we will not create a commission to study the conditions of offensive and retreat. To study this question, we do not have the strength to do so. We now have a number of other issues that require immediate solution. We cannot give a single, even second-rate force for that. And we have to solve other questions, the most difficult questions of policy and strategy, for we remember how we beat Denikin, drove him to the Donetsk district, and, failing to beat him a little, rolled back to Orel. We saw how we fought Kolchak. When we caught up with him to Ufa and when he chased us back to Samara, at that time the whole European press set a new date for the fall of Moscow and Petrograd.

Curiously enough, I saw yesterday an American publication30 where some people in a small edition were collecting full details of what the best American newspapers were writing about Russia. A better agitation for the Bolsheviks cannot be imagined. They are studying how many times the fall of Moscow and Petrograd has been scheduled. This little booklet consists of what the American newspapers said from October 17 to the 20th, and in a nutshell what came out of it; better, more successful than this brief history of the offensive there is none, we will try to publish [it] in Russian.

You remember how our Red Army [was] written about after a hundred and fifty versts of defeats, how it finished Kolchak. It did the impossible, as a comrade from the Red Army told me, before this stop 50 versts away near Chelyabinsk, when it fell into a state of disrepair. Comrade Smirnov said, "Look at the Russian soldier, if we had not gone forward, we [would not have] mobilized [new ones]. In a desperate situation, in terms of shoes, the transition was impossible, it was done by heroes who can do miracles by nature." The Red Army man began to do miracles. He has traveled 80 versts, whether he will reach 00 more or whether it is necessary to stop beyond 00 versts, because he will not reach further, this task is a strategic task of unheard-of difficulty, a new strategy. You see what we went through with Kolchak. You see those elements, those tasks from which the Central Committee drew its conclusion. Tseka himself, worrying inordinately that we made a mistake and suffered a defeat, to correct this mistake, to appoint a commission we do not undertake. We have to solve the issue of current policy - the negotiations in Riga31. We are facing an offensive in Grodno, while Wrangel has taken Alexandrovsk and is advancing on Ekaterinoslav. We must exert all our forces to survive this issue and it would be good to double each force.

This question has been taken up by us, and I must occupy your attention with it. It is clear that the Polish offensive and Wrangel's offensive are one offensive of the Entente. It is putting everything at stake. One letter came today from a com[arish] 32 acting in England, who says: the mood is changing so much that yesterday the German formers6* were for the Bolsheviks, now they are for the Entente. But we have seen coups of greater magnitude. We must reckon with what conditions are now. In all probability, the winter campaign is a foregone conclusion. A number of signs indicate what Poland and the Entente imperialists are counting on. The French are betting on Wrangel and are telling the Poles: be sure that if you get from the Bolsheviks such a border, which would go no farther than Warsaw, your cause is lost. Wrangel stands behind us, and we are your only friends. Politics is not too important. And the French, and the Poles, and Wrangel - it is not easy to bring these three elements into friendly action, even almost impossible to unite the three governments, the three forces against the Bolsheviks. It would seem easy and sufficient to do so, because everybody hates the Bolsheviks. One must imagine how Pilsudski, Wrangel and the French imperialists are ready to give all their strength to suppress the Bolsheviks. All three of them proclaim against the Bolsheviks and can do nothing, even if they were ten times smarter and took [in] ten times smarter people - advisors. Now on the other side, the French use every effort to support Wrangel, and he succeeds. They are sending him reinforcements. On the other hand, the French have to hold the Polish front and say: wait, don't make peace. Poland is petty-bourgeois, patriotic and chauvinistic; the representatives of the PPS party33, the party of the landlords and the Ludovian - the party of the well-to-do peasants, the kulaks34, they say: we prefer peace because war brings ruin.

P o l a n d before the war the situation of P o l a n d was in complete crisis and their representatives said that they w o u l d come out of the war financially completely ruined. This is right, because they know very well that they will have to pay for this war, that France recognizes "sacred private property".

Again there is already a report that 60 steamships have come again to Poland. I do not think that they will strengthen their position with these 60 steamships. Here the comrade who reported to us35 said that the Poles had changed the social composition of the army. This remark passed unnoticed by him, but I note it, because this is the whole point. If we defeated Kolchak, Denikin, we defeated them only because they had changed the social composition of the army, and Wrangel now feels solid only because he has an officer army. And he himself knows that if he relies on the masses, he will fall as quickly as Kolchak and Denikin did.

The Poles attacked us with an army originally made up entirely of young people, who could be worked over, but now they have taken the ages that have gone through a much more brutal war, now they have an army of grown-up men, an army that is not made up of boys who cannot be taught anything. The Poles have now crossed the line that Kolchak and Denikin crossed in their time, the line in which there was first a maximum victory, and the line in which a maximum defeat is assured. These are the conditions in Poland now, and under such conditions we still say that we must avoid a winter campaign, because [for] us the 10,000 lives of Russian workers and peasants are much more valuable than anything else. We understand perfectly well that the stakes are high, that we are strong, that by taking Galicia, where the Soviet system is secured, by taking Galicia, which has a connection with Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where it is already boiling, we are thus developing a direct road to revolution. Because of this it is worth fighting, we cannot neglect this fact. But at the same time we realize that the winter campaign will require many lives, and we say: we must avoid the winter campaign. The chances of this are not great, because Wrangel and Poland, no matter how they quarrel, they still have one international front. But here we will go against it, as we have always done. We will go against all the former international customs, we know very well that the international predators will not believe us, but there is one and another who will always believe us. And we will cut straight ahead, and we propose on behalf of the session of the All-Russian Central Committee to say that we do not want a winter campaign, we want to sign peace in 10 days, and then we give up Galicia and propose a border much east of the Curzon line36. As these concessions are not heavy for us, but it is more important for us to avoid a winter campaign, that we strengthen ourselves in the field of peace building, but we propose to do it in 10 days. But we say that in order to do this, it is necessary that your petty bourgeoisie, patriotic, workers defeat your bourgeoisie and landlords, and this is possible because they are strong, because the peasantry has always been a patriotic lackey - this is inevitable because of the economic, because of the inevitable private property, it is inevitable politically as well, but in any case the chances are there and in any case a private meeting of these parties has already taken place with us7*. T h e representatives of these parties said: we know that it was not the Entente w h i c h saved Warsaw and P o l a n d , they could not have saved us, it was the patriotic upsurge w h i c h saved it, and these lessons are not forgotten.

This is the chance we want to take. We assign enormous concessions and a short period of time to settle the question of a winter campaign. We want to avoid a winter campaign, so we propose to the Poles to make peace now, we put a line east of Brest-Litovsk. What we will win militarily is that we will ensure a quick victory over Wrangel. This is a sufficient gain. We must in relation to Western European policy from the first attempt at an active policy to return to the consequences. The consequences are not so terrible. The consequences of the war do not mean consequences [for] the Communist International. Under the clamor of war the Comintern has forged a tool and honed it so that the gentlemen imperialists will not break it. The development of all parties is still going on in our way, in the way prescribed by the Comintern. It is no exaggeration to say that on this point we can be calm. It comes down to the pace of development, to the conditions of development.

We were not in a position to win a decisive military victory which would have shattered the Versailles peace. We would have had before us the torn Versailles Treaty of world triumphant imperialism, but we were unable to do this. Our basic policy remains the same. We take every opportunity to move from defense to offensive. We have already torn up the Treaty of Versailles and will tear it up at the first opportunity. Now, to avoid a winter campaign, we must make concessions. I do not have the text of the declaration, which is proposed by the party conference for approval and forwarding to the session. I have outlined its political content. In order to avoid a winter campaign, we give the Poles a brief 10-day deadline. Our chances are slim, but we will win under both conditions. We have shown our army that to get rid of the difficulties of the winter campaign we have done everything. For us, the question of territorial boundaries is a 20-point question compared to the question of ending the war as soon as possible. We have given a condition, and no matter how difficult the winter campaign will be, which will be imposed on us, contrary to our peace proposal, we will still end it victoriously.

I have overstepped the bounds of my allotted time and will now turn very briefly to the internal situation. We shall end the winter campaign victoriously in spite of the enormous fatigue.

We have won great successes, and we are on such ground that from the economic point of view it is clear that the base, the basis, the foundation is obtained if we take bread. From 1917 - 1918, 30 million [poods] were procured. The next year - 110.

We are secured now, [because] we have over three hundred million pood[s] of bread, maybe up to 360 million poods. That means 25 to 30 million poods per month. These figures exceed the starvation figures in which we struggled during the famine years. This is a base with which we will not look with such horror at the colored papers, at the millions, hundreds of millions, billions which we have to sign every day and which show that this base - the toy - is torn, that these are the remnants, the scraps of completely old bourgeois clothing8*.

And when 260 million poods of bread a year are in the hands of the state, which has taken them from the peasantry on a sweep basis and as a definite condition of industrial demands, then we have a base of construction, and then we will solve the problem of correct distribution quite freely.

Our economic situation has improved considerably. We know that we have more than 100 million poods of oil. We also know that we have 20 to 30 million poods of coal in the Donetsk basin. We also know that we have improved firewood, which we had to make do with last year without coal and without oil. This shows that despite unheard-of losses, despite incredible fatigue, despite nervous exhaustion, despite bureaucratization, despite the deterioration of the entire party apparatus, despite all this, despite the difficulties of the coming winter campaign, we continue to provide and will continue to provide the main economic base. We have much more bread for the people and bread for industry, i.e., fuel, than last year; and that is why, given the difficult situation we have endured, we say that if we once again rally our forces for the winter campaign and strain them, we are sure of victory.

Now I must speak about concessions. We have talked a lot about concessions. We argued whether they were permissible in principle. We came to the opinion that they are permissible if we put them in the right way. Of course, we will give the imperialists only what we cannot work out ourselves. In England our comrades concluded a concession for 10,000 dessiatinas of forest. In the northern, Arkhangelsk district we will organize this business ourselves, and it is absolutely profitable for us. We have been offered a buyout after 15 years. This period is absolutely acceptable. You should not be afraid of concessions - it is a huge plus.

I recently read a book by the American social chauvinist Spargo37 , our real Aleksinski, who writes that we are a clear failure if we make a concession with the bourgeoisie. Attacks of this kind by the American Aleksinski are completely insignificant, and to these attacks we must treat them completely calmly, for every reasonable worker realizes that we are right.

We strive to help Russia to realize the communist order, but we cannot do without purely Russian forces. We say that the revolution can be created only by the efforts of the advanced workers of the advanced countries.

On this point there has never been a shadow of doubt in [the] mind of any conscious communist. In this period of transition, when one side, the weak side, holds out against all the other sides, this period will be a period of complicated, confused relations. We can rest assured that we will not become entangled, but others will, for we have already proved our international policy toward the small powers. Then, of course, we will exist as an imperialist war-torn socialist republic with incredible wealth that we will not be able to develop in 10-15 years. To bring in foreign capital, to pay only for the fact that we cannot catch up with them with our wealth, is now to provide the basis for peaceful relations. England chased away our trade union organization9*, quarreled with Kamenev, expelled him. This is not so terrible. The Communists knew how not to be afraid of an exhibition. And at the same time an agreement was signed for us to deliver a million sleepers. On these terms we are not able to fight. We have sleepers that we are not able to make ourselves, we have forests that we are not able to use, but you can. Take from us the forests in Ukraine that we are not able to use, and by taking concessions from us, you will create the basis for political and economic peace. You cannot offensive, because any attempt to offensive means a Committee of Action in any country. The Comintern has dozens of connections and agents in every country. Representatives of different countries come to Moscow. We stand independent of all other conditions of development.

This weapon is fundamentally permissible, although it is double-edged. And not only have we become convinced of its admissibility in principle, but practically we have learned how to control it. American politicians write elongated notes accusing us of being bad Democrats. A famous American billionaire38 comes and says: let's make a deal.....

This will probably benefit us. We will have to confine ourselves to a defensive position in relation to the Entente in the international situation, but in spite of the complete failure of the first occasion, our first defeat, we will once more and once more pass from a defensive policy to an offensive one, until we have smashed everyone to pieces.

Published - "Historical Archive", 1992, No. 1, pp. 12-22.

Fund 2, op. 1, d. 25482, l. 1- 28 - transcript, typewritten text.

Final word

Comrades, it remains for me to make a few remarks. Comrade Trotsky tried to interpret his expression "half-somnambulist" in his closing speech in a more acceptable form. In the debate it was pointed out to Comrade Trotsky that if the army was in a half-somnambulic or, as he then put it, half-fatigued state, then the Central Strategic Command was not, or at least should not have been half-fatigued. And the error undoubtedly remains. I pointed out that this is the same error, which is confirmed by the entire course of the development of our military operations. Hence the conclusion: if we have not learned after Denikin and Kolchak to set up this wall of inner fatigue, if the state of mind is one-third somnambulic, then we must say to every political leader: kindly confirm our directives and change. We [have] not yet learned how to do this, although we have done the experience twice with Denikin, Kolchak and Poland.

Concerning Bukharin I must say that he went over the edge in the second fundamental question, just as, for example, Stalin went over the edge. Western Europe was in a state of the greatest fascination. To say now that we were let down is to raise a perfectly legitimate defense of the Red Army. I began my report with the fact that the commission to study the conditions of retreat acted - the Central Committee rejected the retreat. There is no here to justify the special purpose of the commission. That is not the point, but [the] basic political blueprint. We will not consider this thing, but we will take a lesson from here. Bukharin said: you can't count on revolution and neither can you count on war. Revolution is different in that the pace of struggle and the number of those fighting increases 10 and 100 times, like the strikes in Russia in 1905. We continue to maintain the confidence which the Western European front and the central command deserve, for it has stood the test in a series of most difficult campaigns which more than cover all private mistakes.

The comrade who said: you do not analyze mistakes was wrong10*.

That's where we started. I based my report on this. There is an error, let's analyze it. It means that all the party members talked about it, that all the assessments were presented here. Maybe we could have made a mistake on Denikin, but it is not inevitable that we would make a mistake four times on this.

When Comrade Bukharin spoke against Dzerzhinsky that [he] only brings green yearning, I understand the actual situation that Dzerzhinsky11* was talking about. But how can one call it green yearning when one evaluates the facts? What does green yearning have to do with it? Only for the fact that these facts are very sad, that they show that the task is too difficult, for this to berate Poluyan, that he brings green ennui.

BUCHARIN (from his seat). I referred to Cohn.

Both Cohn and Dzerzhinsky cited facts and pointed out the incorrectness of Poluyan's tactical assessment that the situation was difficult, that it was impossible to take into account the situation in a country in which it was so difficult to operate, where we had a population of purely proletarian. But that Poluyan was mistaken, this is proven. And to say that he induced a green ennui is to say nothing. It gives a certain negative line in the sense that you don't pick up negative facts, or you'll be called green ennui. No, on the contrary, we will learn to pick them up.

Now I can summarize some results which coincide with the line of the resolution worked out here. Tov. Trotsky was right when he compared what happened in Poland with the July 1917 uprising on the scale of international revolutionary time. This is correct12*. We ourselves through the February, March, June demonstrations and the manifestation of April 20, which we called half-demonstrations and half-insurrections, we said, "A little more than demonstrations and a little less than uprisings," we went through these "a little more than uprisings," through successful uprisings to the goal.... And that we were really going internationally from a semi-revolution, from a failed sortie to one where there was no miscalculation, and we would learn offensive warfare from that.

We're not going to talk about that in the resolution. We will put forward the one proposed to us by the Polish Communists and say that this is the only correct resolution that could have been adopted. We are going through a series of steps in which to develop the oppressed proletarian masses, giving them the opportunity to grow, to develop and to strengthen themselves and to avoid those mistakes which are inevitably on the way.

This conclusion is by no means that of the members of the Central Committee, but that of the comrades who were at the front and of the delegates, and so there was no talk of distrust here at all. The fundamental legality of offensive action in the sense of revolutionary decrees is recognized, the clarity of the accounting of forces, the thoroughness of the verification of negative and positive facts is necessary.

I received a note: why was little said about Italy? Because, except for newspaper information about Italy, we have nothing. Perhaps it is for the best, because then the bourgeoisie would perhaps notify if there was victory on its side. But maybe it is also for the worse. And in general we can say that the international situation is giving birth to a new international revolution quite independently of our steps in Poland and that the Italian revolution has gained a new dimension. If there were a Soviet Poland or a Soviet Hungary, it would be even better. By no means do we vow that tomorrow [we will not] venture for Hungary as well. I am sure that the conference will agree with us in this respect. But we will say that we will risk in such a way that with every doubled step we will remember where to stop. We will take risks in the hope of helping Italy; unfortunately, this is now practically impossible.

But what is important is, after all, what Comrade Trotsky has now emphasized in consolation, that it is absolutely necessary to smash Wrangel, to smash him completely by winter, because of the two fronts we make great territorial concessions to Poland, but it does not threaten us with the fact that we will have from it the development of the civil war, the cutting off of bread, oil, etc. That is why Wrangel comes first for us, and territorial concessions to Poland are not so important. Here there was no objection to our declaration of principle towards Poland, and this is a guarantee that we will rally our forces.

Maybe we shall arrange additionally a meeting of a purely military supply character, so that comrades would share their impressions, as, for example, a comrade from Kharkov13* could tell what he said concerning the military supply initiative when they did what was not done elsewhere, and then such examples could easily be transferred to other places.

And I will finish by reading that text of the declaration which is now finalized and is proposed for approval by the conference so that the Communist faction will bring this to the VTsIK session tomorrow and approve it there, and so that tomorrow night this declaration could be in the hands of our delegation14*.

Published - "Historical Archive", 1992, No. 1, pp. 27-29.

Fund 44, op. 1, d. 5, l. 127- 132 - transcript, typewritten text.

1*The amendment is written in place of the crossed out: "at first". Lenin's edit is printed in italics

2*Translated by V.I.Lenin from: "us, for a whole number of nationalities, workers and peasants, who".

3* Written in place of the unexplained crossed-out word

4* Further V.I.Lenin stopped correcting the transcript, it was handed over to the journalist V.S.Popov-Dubovsky to compile a report, which was published in the newspapers.

5* Apparently a typo; the meaning should be: "further".

6* So in the transcript.

7* So in the transcript.

8* Cf: Lenin V.I. Complete Collected Works, vol. 41, с. 285.

9* Correctly - delegation.

10* Meaning S.K. Minin.

11* There is a mistake in the transcript - it should be D.V.Poluyan.

12* There is a mistake in the transcript, it should be wrong.

13* It means E.G.Evdokimov.

14* Then V.I.Lenin read out the declaration (for its text see: Ninth Conference of the RCP(b). Protocols. M., 1972, pp. 79-81; Decrees of Soviet Power. Vol. X. M., 1980, pp. 206-208).

1The transcript of the political report of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) at the IX All-Russian Conference of the RCP(b) was first published in 1992 in the journal "Historical Archive" No. 1, pp. 12-22. In 1920 a newspaper account of the report was published in Pravda and Izvestiya VTsIK (No. 216 of September 29, 1920). The report is included in Lenin's Collected Works (see: Lenin V.I. Poln. sobr. op. cit., vol. 41, pp. 281-285).

In the journal "Historical Archive" the political report is published on a copy of the transcript from the collection of documents of the IX All-Russian Conference of the RCP(b) (RCCHIDNI, f. 44, op. 1, d. 5). This publication is based on the copy preserved in Lenin's archive. It contains corrections made by V.I.Lenin, as well as by B.C.Popov-Dubovsky, an editorial staff member of Pravda. Having begun to correct the transcript, Lenin soon stopped work and proposed to the Pravda editorial staff to prepare a summary of his report to the conference in the form of a short newspaper report. Lenin rejected the first version of the prepared report, inscribing on it:

[["about Poland"]]  [[ Unsuccessful exposition[s] of my speech ]]  [[ 25.IX. 1920]]

(RCCHIDNI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 15516). The version of the newspaper report published in Pravda was written by Popov-Dubovsky, who had received a transcript from Lenin. While preparing the report, the journalist corrected some factual errors in it.

2V.I.Lenin is referring to the statement of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR to the government of Poland and the Polish people of January 28, 1920, and to the appeal of the VTsIK to the Polish people of February 2, 1920 (see: Decrees of Soviet Power. Vol. VII. M., 1975, pp. 141-142, 162-165).

3The negotiations between representatives of the Russian and Polish Red Cross Societies, which took place in October-November 1919 in Belorussia at the Mikashevichi station, are meant. They ended with the signing of the "Agreement on the Final Settlement of the Question of Polish Hostages in the RSFSR" and the "Agreement on the Mutual Transfer of Civilian Prisoners".

July 412, 1920. The Soviet government received a note from the British Foreign Minister D. Curzon of July 11 demanding the cessation of the Red Army offensive on the Polish front (see: Documents of the Foreign Policy of the USSR. Vol. III. M., 1959, pp. 54-55).

5The texts of resolutions on these issues have not been found, nor are they in the minutes of the Politburo and plenums of the Central Committee of the RCP(b). See doc. 246.

6Referring to the Second Congress of the Comintern, held in Petrograd (opening) and Moscow from July 19 to August 7, 1920. The congress was attended by 218 delegates from 67 workers' organizations from 37 countries.

7V.I.Lenin is referring to delegates from the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, created in April 1917 at the founding congress in Gotha. In October 1920 a split occurred at the party congress in Halle; one part of the party merged with the Communist Party of Germany in December 1920, while the other part, retaining its former name, existed until 1922.

8See Doc. 252, note 2.

9See Lenin's work "The Childish Disease of 'Leftism' in Communism" (Lenin V.I. Complete Collected Works, vol. 41, p. 96).

10V.I.Lenin tells about a meeting with a delegation of English Trades Unionists and Laborists in Moscow on May 26, 1920.

11At that time the Russian delegation was conducting peace negotiations in London with the English government.

12The "Action Committee" ("Action Council") was established on August 9, 1920 in London at a joint conference of representatives of the Parliamentary Committee of the Tred-Unions, the Executive Committee and the Parliamentary Group of the Labor Party.

13The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919. by Great Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Japan and the Powers allied with them, on the one hand, and Germany, on the other, and was an act signaling the end of World War 1, 1914-1918.

14Kappists - participants of the "Kapp putsch" in Germany (March 10-17, 1920), named after one of the putsch leaders, W. Kapp, who claimed to be the head of the government.

15The League of Nations was created in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference of the victorious powers in World War 1. Its charter was part of the Treaty of Versailles and was signed by representatives of 44 states. The Soviet Union joined the League of Nations in 1934. Dissolved in 1946 in connection with the formation of the United Nations Organization (UNO).

16V.I.Lenin is referring to the note of the Russian Government to the British Government of July 17, 1920 (see: Documents of Foreign Policy of the USSR. Vol. III, pp. 47-53).

17It seems that Lenin is referring to his report on the work of the VTsIK and the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR at the first session of the VTsIK of the VII convocation on February 2, 1920 (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Works, vol. 40, pp. 89-96).

18The Peace Treaty between Russia and Estonia was signed on February 2, 1920 (see: Documents of Foreign Policy of the USSR. Vol. II. Moscow, 1958, pp. 339-354).

19The Communist Party of Germany was created by members of the "Spartacus Union" and other radical elements of German Social Democracy at the founding congress on December 30, 1918. - January 1, 1919.

20This refers to the extreme right wing of German Social Democracy, one of whose leaders was F. Scheidemann.

21V.I.Lenin is referring to his report at the opening of the Second Congress of the Comintern on July 19, 1920 in Petrograd (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Works, vol. 41, pp. 215-235).

22In 1920, the population of the earth was 1 billion 811 million people.

23V.I.Lenin says about the Soviet Government's reply of July 17, 1920 to the note of the British Government of July 11: "The Russian Government has never been informed by the so-called League of Nations of its constitution and existence, and the Soviet Government has never had occasion to pass resolutions on its recognition or non-recognition of this community" (Documents of the Foreign Policy of the USSR. Vol. III, p. 50).

24This refers to the "Conditions of Admission to the Communist International" adopted by the Second Congress of the Comintern, based on the principles developed by Lenin (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Collected Works, vol. 41, pp. 204-211). "Conditions" were adopted by the Second Congress of the Comintern on August 6, 1920 (see: Communist International, No. 13, September 28, 1920, stlb. 2387-2392).

25V.I.Lenin is referring to the declaration of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies "To the Peoples of the World" of March 14 (27), 1917 (see: Izvestiya Petrogradskogo Sovet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, No. 15, March 15 (28), 1917).

26 Lenin learned about the February bourgeois-democratic revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II from the throne from the newspapers "Zuricher Post" and "Neue Zuricher Zeitung" of March 2 (15), 1917. On that day the Provisional Government was formed.

27This refers to the failure of the Russian offensive launched by order of A.F.Kerensky on June 18 (July 1), 1917. On July 4 (17) an anti-government demonstration (more than 500,000 people) took place in Petrograd.

28L.B.Kamenev spoke at the conference after V.I.Lenin (see: Ninth Conference of the RCP(b). September 1920. Minutes. Moscow, 1972, pp. 13-23).

29L.B.Kamenev was expelled from England on September 1, 1920 on the charge of subsidizing The Daily Herald, the organ of the British Socialist Party, which had been published since 1912.

30It seems to be a collection of documents "Russian-American Relations. March 1917 - March 1920. Dokuments and Papers" (N.Y., 1920).

31In Riga from April 1920 negotiations on peace between the delegations of Russia and Latvia were held, which ended on August 11, 1920 with the conclusion of the Soviet-Latvian Peace Treaty (see: Documents of Foreign Policy of the USSR. Vol. III, pp. 101-116).

32Whose letter from England was received by V.I.Lenin on September 22, 1920, it was not possible to establish; at that time L.B.Krasin was conducting trade negotiations in London, and he could inform Lenin about it.

33See Doc. 54, note 9.

The PPS supported the policy of aggression against Soviet Russia.

34This refers to the party "Polsko stronnichtwo ludowe "Vyzvolienie"" - a peasant party, which emerged in 1915.

35With a report on the political situation in Poland, V. Ulyanovsky spoke at the conference.

36The Russian government's statement on peace proposals to Poland was adopted at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on September 23, 1920. Lenin analyzed two versions of the draft statement and amended them. The statement was published in the newspapers Izvestiya VTsIK, Pravda and Bednota on September 25, 1920 (see: Decrees of Soviet Power. Vol. X, pp. 203-211).

37Which particular book by D. Spargo was read by V.I. Lenin, it has not been possible to establish. Lenin's Complete Works (vol. 42, pp. 512-513) mentions four books by Spargo: "Bolshevism. The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy" (1919); "The Psychology of Bolshevism" (1920); "The Greatest Failure in all History" (1920); "Russia as an American Problem" (1920). For mentions of Spargo in Lenin's works, see: ibid, vol. 42, pp. 24, 43; vol. 43, с. 189.

38V.I.Lenin is referring to the beginning of negotiations with V. Vanderlip, a representative of American business circles, who arrived in Moscow on September 17, 1920. On that day G.V.Chicherin informed Lenin of the arrival of Vanderlip, who proposed to conclude an agreement on concessions for the exploitation of oil, coal and fisheries in the Primorsky Krai and Kamchatka. Lenin wrote in reply to Chicherin: "I am quite willing to negotiate. Speed them up" (V.I.Lenin. Biographical Chronicle. Vol. 9, p. 284).